SPEAKING FREELY David Albright's role in Iran dialogue
By Ardeshir Ommani
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say.Please click hereif you are interested in contributing.
Once again, on April 5-6, 2013, a group of highly placed diplomats of the P5+1 countries (the United Nations Security Council's permanent five members plus Germany) and Iran's nuclear negotiating team gathered with fanfare in Almaty, Kazakhstan to perform their ritual of blames and counter-blames. In the late evening of April 3, ahead of boarding a flight to Almaty, a senior member of the United States negotiating team told journalists gathered in a conference room that "what would be most helpful is
for Iran to give us concrete responses what they think they are willing to do on this proposal."
It is amazingly strange to see that a representative on a US international negotiating team expresses his right to demand Iran's "concrete response" on the issue at hand without pointing out the responsibilities of P5+1 and leaving the bans of multi-layered unilateral sanctions intact!
Even when Iran announced that it is prepared to halt its 20% uranium enrichment activities and has neutralized 40% of Iran's stock of 20% enriched uranium by oxidizing it, the substantial concession was not good enough for the US and its allies to command even the partial lifting of US financial sanctions against the engines of the Iranian economy.
The demands of the US and its allies - Britain, France, Germany, and including Israel - in depriving Iran of all scientific activities is endless and all-embracing. Even in words, they refuse to admit that Iran, as one of the original co-signers of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has the right to enrich uranium for civilian power plants and for use in medical science.
It is on the basis of this assumption that the US and its Western allies have made any reduction in the severity of the sanctions' regime conditional upon a total termination of Iran's nuclear enrichment activities and total disposal of Iran's stock of 20% uranium-enriched material, by shipping it out to a country of their choosing.
The biggest of the imperialist powers know in advance that such a demand is unacceptable to any respectable nation (and has been stated so by Iran publicly in all international forums and venues). Therefore, the trap is set for another set of sanctions and another round of senseless "dialogue". This endless torture process ends with no penalty on those who perpetuate it and ends periodically in higher prices of consumer goods and agony for the masses of Iranian wage-workers. To those of us witnessing this torturous process the question poses itself: "Why does the Islamic Republic of Iran still remain a willing player in this rigged-up game?"
How the US media defames Iran
A great bulk of the news/analytical articles that have appeared in the corporate media on Iran-US relations has been repetitious guesswork, conditional contexts, stories based on unrealistic assumptions, loaded with innuendos, all intended for the consumption of the American and Iranian political class (bureaucracy) and is of no significant consequence except creating justifications for further repugnant and rabid attacks by such infamous and bankrupt ruffians turned politicians, such as Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Ros Lehtinen, Miami's Republican Party anti-Cuban congresswoman and war-lover from Florida's 27th District (with a big war budget!), and John "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" McCain of Arizona.
A broad network of social parasites in the US Congress, in the administration and in its fifth column in the US media grows humongously on this waste, while the intelligence and the so-called "defense" industries and the adjunct departments with tens of thousands of employees carry out the military and diplomatic offensives and plans of the Empire in Decline.
Many of the so-called "documents" on the issue of Iran and its nuclear program are incoherent, mundane and fictitious, and only serve as hollow propaganda pieces for justifying the survival of the status quo. To a lesser degree this characterization - indoctrinating the public, wrapped in nationalistic slogans by assuming defensive postures - serves the same purpose of justifying the status quo among some circles in the Islamic Republic, especially amid the rival political groupings competing in the up-coming presidential election.
No one can swear by it, but in practice the number of credible and knowledgeable statesmen and historians that step forward and say that the US cannot afford to have a war with Iran is noticeably increasing. Among them is Allan Lichtman, American historian and lately a co-author of FDR and the Jews. No one can attribute his position on US-Iran relations to his belief in liberalism because he is as pro-imperialist as American apple pie.
Attending a program in Kolkata, Lichtman said "Frankly speaking at this point of time there is not going to be a war on Iran as the US cannot afford it. The Americans have this illusion that they can control the world but the fact is they don't have an answer to the Iran issue."
The fact is, the objective condition was reached a long time ago, prior to the surge in Iraq, where the US could no longer afford to fight "three wars at the same time", as the infamous Donald Rumsfeld foolishly bragged in front of the public.
Even past Bush administration supporters stated this reality as far back as spring 2011. Bob Gates, secretary of defense following Rumsfeld, said to a group of West Point cadets, "? any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined." We point out that today's US economy, military and morale is in a much worse condition than 2007. Unfortunately, some spokespersons who are still repeating the empty threats of the Tel Aviv government haven't faced these hard facts.
The latest propaganda
In the last quarter century, truck-loads of researched articles, books, plans and proposals have been issued and published by the mainstream media, the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency and its auxiliaries, the Foreign Ministry of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the US Congress and the State Department.
All these sources and public manifestations, barring the arrogant pronouncements by nuclear scientists, professors, diplomats, and politicized historians, prove that Iran has not diverted part of its enriched uranium for use in building nuclear weapons or to say it another way that Iran has not had a plan of building atomic bombs or has not tried to attain the capability of joining the atomic club. Is this fact crystal clear for President Barack Obama, the US Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or his mouthpiece in Washington - David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS)?
Any respectable individual with a minimum of knowledge of nuclear science and the atomic bomb building process knows that in order to build a real bomb, the actors need to test the force of the explosive materials many times before subjecting the bomb to the force of the explosive ignition. Naturally such explosive trials easily could be picked up by all the intelligence satellites around the world, just as there are instruments to detect earthquakes even miles deep into the oceans.
In all these years, none of the members of the P5+1 has provided the world community with such evidence. The question is then why US Administrations, a host of US congressmen and congresswomen, the secretary general of the United Nations or even the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency spread vague propaganda and innuendos to the contrary.
The answer to this question could be many things: using the occasion to extract concessions from the Iranian government in the Gulf region, to teach the Iranian people that revolution brings hardship and isolation to the nation, or there is only one omnipotent in the world and that is the ruling class of the United States of America?
Such senators and officials as John McCain, President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Robert Menendez of New Jersey may say that Iran has not tried to build a bomb, but it is in the "process of building one". Is it rational to think that while Pakistan, North Korea and India were able to build one, Iran, after 25 years has not reached its destination? This is quite absurd. It is a policy of the US-Iran cold war to wear Iran down. But what happens if Iran abstains from participating in this show and lets the likes of Albright stew in their own juices?
Albright and the ISIS
ISIS president David Albright misses no real or perceived opportunity to blame Iran for world security or the lack thereof, especially on such an occasion as President Obama's visit with the isolated prime minister of Israel last month, Netanyahu. In an article that appeared in the op-ed section of the Wall Street Journal on March 26, 2013, Albright and two of his associates, Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and Orde Kittrie, a law professor at Arizona State University, all three in the heading of their masterpiece unanimously called for "stopping an undetectable Iranian bomb".
They conjured up that even with the help of the most sophisticated and advanced scientific and technological tools, the traces of the component parts of a bomb in the process of its formation could not be "detected" and hence no verification of their metamorphosis could be satisfactorily discerned. But that didn't stop them from dubbing the title of the article, "Stopping an Undetectable Iranian Bomb". Obviously these gentlemen with advanced degrees are looking for a ghost that no one can find!
Albright is especially skillful in the use of obscurantism and conditional clauses. He doesn't see himself obliged to provide the factual information that could be verified through examination. All three authors agreed that even with the help of US-Israeli intelligence the Iranian nuclear bomb or even the stages prior to it are not detectable, that is, no traces of it could be found with all the advanced technology available to the US-IAEA-France-England. But the funny side of the title is that it calls for its stoppage!
Let's see how Albright earns his bread and butter from tax-sourced federal budget and the kind of service ISIS provides to US militarism, Israel and the related information technology.
Among many responses and critiques of ISIS's report authored by Albright, two excellent scientific analyses stand out: An exhaustive expose by the "Moon of Alabama" was entitled "Iran Buys Magnets that DO NOT FIT its Centrifuges". On February 20, 2013, Yousef Butt from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists laid open an original engineering and scientific basis for the fallacies construed from Albright's imaginary Iranian purchase order for 100,000 highly specialized ring magnets to be used in 50,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges.
In his rebuke of Butt's scientific criticism of the ISIS Iran report, Albright, in his blame game with the long title named "Preventing the Suppression of Uncomfortable Truths and Iran's Nuclear Program", writes that Butt's challenge of the validity of an Iranian purchase and specifications of the magnetic rings do not affect ISIS's conclusions about Iran's attempt to acquire 100,000 ring magnets, undoubtedly for its gas centrifuges.
Such invented stories habitually woven together gave President Obama in his visit with Netanyahu of Israel ammunition to state "Iran has a one-year time span to build nuclear weapons". Without a doubt, the David Albrights of the world earn their lunch by pleasing the egos and foreign policy aims of the imperialists and helping them to take one more step toward war against Iran.
For sure some of you have already noticed that the heart of the sentence two paragraphs above stands out with the operative word "attempt". The identical case in domestic affairs is when groups of three or four heavily armed police officers in Brooklyn or Los Angeles view practically every black, Spanish and poor working class person as a "security threat" and engage in what is labeled "Stop and Frisk", which often ends up with police pumping a hail of bullets into the bodies of these community members. It is the same mentality and poses a risk to working class people everywhere.
In his divisive piece, Albright doesn't even once mention whether the "attempt" was successful. On the contrary, his aims are two-fold. Firstly, Iranians are deceptive, operate in the dark and are not upright, implying this to be a national trait. Secondly, the attribute that our champion of "nuclear disarmament" David Albright burdens to plant the figment of his biased imagination in the middle of an unsophisticated American public, but especially among officialdom, is that Iranian nuclear scientists lack the knowledge of such simple engineering issues such as gauging the exterior diameters of the magnetic rings and their necessary tolerances.
Albright insinuates that the best they could do is to copy and borrow the achievements of others, such as Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea - (DPRK) and of course the Chinese and Russian technological nuclear advances.
The target of the US is not Iran alone. The operatives in the communications industry use every occasion to facilitate the overthrow of every and any government that is perceived as adversaries or obstructions in the way of control of raw materials, markets, technology, capital investment, huge rates of surplus value (profits) and domination of monopoly capital.
Fundamentally, there are two strands woven into the fabric of Albright's politicized and pseudo-scientific narrative, namely, "Iran Buys Magnets that Do Not Fit Its Centrifuges", and secondly that Iran tries to hide its purchase by going to secondary markets, implying that Iran is violating US-UN sanctions.
In his illustrative piece of work, the only source as the origin of the revelation is Albright's knowledge of an advertisement through which an Iranian businessman on behest of the Iranian government tried to purchase as many as 100,000 magnetic rings for "advanced" and fast-running centrifuges. He further added that the solicitation appeared in an advertisement column of a Chinese newspaper.
If the purchase was violating the US-UN sanctions rule and hence was intended to be hidden from the watchful eyes of the American sanctions' enforcers, then why did the Iranian authorities decide to publicly announce the solicitation of the rings in a vehicle, in this case a newspaper, that even the David Albright's of the world could easily find out? Why didn't the Iranian government agencies in charge of securing the rings for their centrifuges contact their counterparts in Beijing, with which they have amicable relations?
Certainly Albright and company in the ISIS not only avoid answering these questions, they don't tell readers whether the purchase in fact took place!! The answers to these questions, in a short version, is obvious: it is either the figment of Albright's imagination or the advertisement was placed in the Chinese publication by the US- Western intelligence rings for the purpose of "proving" Iran's hidden agenda, which would count as one more internationally imposed sanction and further punitive action is needed to stop Iran from building nuclear bombs away from the eyes of the "international community".
Furthermore, how did Albright and bedfellows such as Joby Warrick of the Washington Post learn that the magnets didn't fit the centrifuges? Since each machine requires two magnetic rings, on the basis of 100,000 rings ordered, according to Albright, Iran is adding about 50,000 new centrifuges, which number should scare Washington, Tel Aviv, and London.
Apparently, Albright has turned a scientific institute into a house of horror. Before the invasion of Iraq, ISIS was famous as "the institute of scary Iraq stories". There is a strong similarity between the kind of science Albright espouses in connection to Iran's nuclear program and the scientific prowess that George W Bush's secretary of state Collin Powell demonstrated at the UN when he held a small test tube high in the air and pompously declared that president Saddam Hussein armed with this much poisonous substance could threaten not only the US but the whole world.
Who benefits most from perpetual contradiction?
In order to cast an aura of scientific credibility and hence authority over ISIS, Albright pretends to have every access to the US international intelligence stock of information. Capitalizing on the image of being in on the intelligence services, he easily finds cohorts in the media world ready to serve his cause of raising tensions and actualize Israel's domestic and foreign policies agenda, even when at times it clashes with the long-term national interests of the US in the Middle East and Central Asian shifting geopolitical conditions.
Though it is not illegal, a critical commentator, Amar wrote on February 14, 2013, that "Albright is also a citizen of Israel and owns a condominium in Haifa". Hopefully his Israeli citizenship doesn't influence his judgment with regards to Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Could we say that the status of ISIS as an independent and credible scientific institution has been damaged as a result of it being used as an instrument to serve the tactical maneuvers of US-Israeli foreign and domestic policies?
In his priceless rebuke of Albright's "scientific" distortion and at the same time grand-standing, Yousef Butt in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists tried to separate the kernel from the chaff and liberate the science of physics and engineering from the scary ghost tales that Albright is fond of wrapping around them.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say.Please click hereif you are interested in contributing. Articles submitted for this section allow our readers to express their opinions and do not necessarily meet the same editorial standards of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
Ardeshir Ommani, president of the American Iranian Friendship Committee (AIFC), is a writer and political analyst with a background in political economy. AIFC's website is www.iranaifc.com. The author may be contacted at ardeshiromm@verizon.net
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